Quang Hai Nguyen

This image is part of the series "to: the moon", 2020.

Bio: Quang Hai Nguyen is a Vietnamese photographer born and based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal who explores the notion of home and grief within diasporic communities. Through the contemplation of everyday life and the people that surround him, photography allows him to use the camera as a tool for introspection, a mirror that reflects the ephemerality and loneliness of our being while also revealing universal feelings that can be shared amongst intergenerational members. He obtained a college diploma in photography at Cégep du Vieux Montréal and is currently pursuing this degree at Concordia University.

About the work: There’s this feeling of powerlessness when it comes to trying to understand, in a broad way, the meaning of our existence. Knowing that there will eventually be an ending to everything that we build and cherish, we end up constantly wondering why things suddenly come and go at any moment of our life. Personally, I come to feel overwhelmed and even more frightened about the consciousness of our disappearance than death itself. While we desperately seek answers or ways to cope with the fear of being left alone, to: the moon is an ongoing visual conversation towards my anxiety of our inevitable future and a reminder to everyone, including myself, that we are and will still be loved no matter the distances that separate us.  

Through the internal world of dreams, this project takes place in a re-imagined world of the unknown and ever-growing landscape that is surrounding us. While these pictures reveal the never-ending cycle of life and death, nature manifests itself as symbolic figures mimicking the fragile and lonely state of our being. As we slowly become small traces of time, I hopelessly wish for a future in which we can all somehow be together again.

www.quanghainguyen.com